I'm sick of deleting spam accounts on this forum, so I've closed registration of new accounts, meaning that it's no longer possible to post in this forum unless you already have an account. I'd call that a shame, but it's not like there was much discussion happening in any case. If you'd like to discuss anything you see on this forum, you're welcome to email me directly: brett.watson@gmail.com.

1) In the Administrators Panel choose the "Users and Groups" tab 2) select "Custom profile fields" from the menu3) enter "nospam" and click on the "create new field" button4)Publicly display profile field: select "No"Check boxes: "Display on registration screen", "Required field" and "Hide profile field" In the "Field description" text area type: What is the square root of four divided by one half? (You must enter a number)

I've used this strategy myself with great success and when used in conjunction with captcha it has the advantage of keeping out all spam bots as well as many undesirable users. The answer, if it is not obvious to someone who really wants to register (many people think the obvious answer is "1"), is easily attainable by copying and pasting the word problem into the Google search engine. The average human spammer just won't bother with it. For them time is money. After I implemented this strategy, I never had to delete another spammer account and the people who got past it and registered commented that they thought it was clever and actually enjoyed having to think about it after getting it wrong initially.

Of course, you can use any kind of simple riddle that you prefer. PHPBB 3 provides a few different options for this strategy.

If you choose to try this, you might want to delete this post afterword.

I may give it a try, but I'm pretty sure that some of my spam account sign-ups are people doing it manually. Maybe they're also too dim to figure out a mathematics problem like that -- it's hard to say.

Whatever the case, I'm really not a fan of the phpBB admin interface. I only use this forum because it's a one-click install with my current hosting provider.

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